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National Post: O’Keeffe Museum to build database of New Mexico sites. “The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum has received federal preservation dollars to build a database that will house information about the New Mexico locations that are represented in works by the American modernist painter. The museum announced the $30,000 grant Thursday, saying the database will support a mobile app and website about the historic sites.”

This is from May, but I missed it, and it’s too good to miss. From Africa is a Country: The Archive of Malian Photography. “‘Every unit of meaning, and not just every image, is a public crossroads of histories of interpretation.’ This reflection comes from Paul Landau’s introduction to Images and Empire: Visuality in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa (2002), but also applies to the images and the overall mission of the Archive of Malian Photography. By digitizing more than 100,000 images by Malian photographers, project director Candace Keller, a professor of African art history and visual culture at Michigan State University, hopes that the collection will ‘shape the way photographic history and cultural practice in West Africa are taught and studied since the concepts displayed go beyond what we’re used to seeing….'”

Osage Nation: Osage Nation visits Google headquarters and Unicode Conference. “Osage Language Master Language Teacher Mongrain Lookout met with tech engineers in late October to talk about the revitalization of the Osage language for Osages everywhere. According to Lookout and the Osage Language Department Webmaster Mark Pearson, strides gained by other non-English languages are helping the Osage language move faster towards full mobile access. Just this week, an unreleased version of the first Osage language app became available Apple and Android users. The app features Unicode developed for the Osage language orthography. This first step is huge for language revitalization and the Osage Nation is already working on developing keyboards and predictive text for new speakers who will want more after using the language app.”

BuzzFeed: Bogus Health News Is All Over Pinterest. “Pinterest is where many people turn for ideas about how to be healthy. But the recipes, nutrition advice, and other colorful infographics that the site is so well-known for are rife with bad information about health and science.”

University of Arkansas: Pryor Center Announces $1.5 Million Tyson Gift to Digitize KATV Collection. ” The David and Barbara Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences has received a $1.5 million contribution from Barbara A. Tyson and the Tyson Foods Foundation Inc. to create the KATV Preservation Project…. KATV, the ABC affiliate in Little Rock, accumulated news footage for more than 50 years and created one of the largest local television news archives in the country. The collection, which contains approximately 26,000 hours of video and film, is currently stored at the Arkansas State Library in Little Rock and includes all aspects of Arkansas television coverage, including major news and weather events, Arkansas sports, politics and features on many Arkansans who have represented the state in the national or worldwide spotlight.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

TechCrunch: DeepMind has yet to find out how smart its AlphaGo Zero AI could be. “DeepMind’s AlphaGo Zero was an immense achievement not just because of its speed, but because it was able to accomplish all this starting from scratch – researchers didn’t do the first step where it uses human data as a baseline from which to begin the system’s education. Instead, it used spontaneous data to start, literally trying out moves on the board at random and working out which were most effective. Perhaps the most interesting thing about AlphaGo Zero, though, isn’t how fast it was able to do what it did, or with such efficacy, but also that it ultimately didn’t even achieve its full potential. DeepMind CEO and co-founder Demis Hassabis explained on stage at Google’s Go North conference in Toronto that the company actually shut down the experiment before it could determine the upper limits of AlphaGo Zero’s maximum intelligence.” Because they NEEDED THE COMPUTERS FOR SOMETHING ELSE?

Pew (pew pew pew pew pew!): More Americans are turning to multiple social media sites for news . “Americans are more likely than ever to get news from multiple social media sites, according to a recent Pew Research Center report. About a quarter of all U.S. adults (26%) get news from two or more social media sites, up from 15% in 2013 and 18% in 2016. But there is considerable variation in the extent to which each site’s news users get news from other sites, and which sites those are.”

FiveThirtyEight: Political Twitter Is No Place For Moderates. “Twitter has never been a bastion of the Queen’s English, but recent reporting has unearthed a variety of polarizing posts about American politics that are presumed to be of Russian origin, in part because some of them use awkward English. The revelations have led to recriminations against the tech platform and an invitation for the company to testify before Congress this week. The Russians might have occasionally gotten their words mangled, but they were right when it came to mimicking their targets, attacking from both the right and the left. It turns out that American Twitter users who tweet about politics overwhelmingly come from the extremes of the political spectrum as well.” Good morning, Internet…

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